Scary Kids Scaring Kids

Related Content

• Five Awkward Moments in the Phoenix Food Scene, 2011
  December 29, 2011
• Burned Cross Found on Gilbert Man's Lawn; African-American Victim Threatened in Note
  December 27, 2011
• Brainy Day
  December 15, 2011
• Liberty Market Community Dinner: An Ode to Gilbert's Farmers Market
  January 18, 2012
• The Spot Opens in Gilbert
  January 31, 2012

More About

• Gilbert
• Scary Kids Scaring Kids

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Music Newsletter: Keep your thumb on the local music scene with music features, additional online music listings and show picks. We'll also send special ticket offers and music promotions available only to our Music Newsletter subscribers.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

No one can accuse Gilbert's Scary Kids Scaring Kids of lacking ambition. The local sextet's self-titled second album is an epic song cycle characterized by the album-opening anthem "Degenerates," which casts us into a jackbooted future, judging from all the clicks of pistol safeties and ominous helicopter hovering. The song sets up an album-long theme of conformity versus individuality during which they go a little heavy on the drama ("Taking a life's worth of cigarette burns/This is our fight for freedom"). But cable-movie level melodrama aside, SK² has created a compelling album with texture and dynamics. They straddle the splintering factions of emo and create some of their own, segueing from punchy punk-pop (album highlight "Faces"), to proggy breakdowns and arpeggios ("A Pistol to My Temple"), to atmospheric modern rock ("Set Sail") to enjoyably anachronistic glam-inflected metal ("Snake Devil"). Fortunately, from the production to the playing, everything's executed and put together so well that it sounds like an album instead of a genre-hopping clusterfuck. Not that the album wouldn't be stronger if they dialed back the overheated rhetoric and 86'd piano-ballad treacle like "Watch Me Bleed," but there's so much heart and creativity at play you'll forgive those smaller sins.